You know when you read anything by Anthony Neil Smith that you're in for a wild ride, so here we go again. Mike Thooft is a poet and college teacher. His wife is unfaithful. Boy, is she ever. In fact, the first half of this book could have been a 1960s Bedside Book titled Faculty Orgy Club. There's some funny academic satire throughout, and Smith could write an amusing mainstream academic novel if he wanted to, I'm sure. But I digress. Throoft gets plenty of proof of his wife's flings from his friend Octavia VanderPlatts, a rather large genius. Like Nero Wolfe, she has a greenhouse, but she doesn't grow orchids.In the second half of the book, the crime novel kicks in. One of the faculty orgy participants is murdered. Throoft is accused of the crime, and it's up to him and VanderPlatts to find the real killer. This is complicated by the fact that someone has just about destroyed VanderPlatts' life.
You won't find any likable characters here (well, I didn't like any of them), but they're real enough, and their problems make for compulsive reading. As I said at the beginning, it's a wild ride, and it's only 99 cents for Kindle. Check it out.
2 comments:
This is a very good book but I was hoping for more sex.
I liked it but more sex woul have helped.
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